My last read of the year turned out to be one of the best books I read in 2025. Buckeye by Patrick Ryan is my favorite kind of novel: old-fashioned storytelling from an omniscient narrator, a multi-generational family saga that follows characters over the courses of their lives. Ryan sets his novel in the fictional […]
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Record everything! “Our memories are precious to us and constitute our sense of self. Why not enhance them by recording all of your life?” Yannic Kappes is a philosopher and a postdoc at the University of Vienna in Austria. In this article he takes the proposition that “[c]urrent technology allows for radical memory enhancement” to
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The dawn of the post-literate society If the reading revolution [of the middle of the eighteenth century] represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the [current] screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history. James Marriott laments the “draining away of culture, critical thinking
I don’t write fiction, but I do read a lot of it. All that reading has made me think that the very first question fiction writers must ask themselves is Whose story is this to tell? Writer Elaine Hsieh Chou suggests a similar thought in a recent interview: And Chou’s quotation further suggests that examining
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In 2025, we were surviving, if perhaps not always thriving. We sang along to “Golden” in the grocery store and hung Labubus from our bags. We reheated nachos. We saw Sinners in multiple… Source: Literary Hub » The 50 Biggest Literary Stories of the Year
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The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is rage bait The powers that be at Oxford University Press have chosen rage bait as their word of the year for 2025. Rage bait is defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to
Best Books 2025 Publishers Weekly got the ball rolling on the year’s best books lists back in late October. This is the landing page, from which you can connect with focused links of works in a myriad of categories. BEST OF 2025: Holiday Gift Guide BookBub offers a list to help you “find the perfect
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The Essential Kate Atkinson “Surprising, versatile, dark and funny, the British writer has something for (almost) everyone.” Kate Atkinson’s 1995 novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum stands atop my list of Books to Reread, and I swear that some September (my traditional rereading month) I’m going to get to it. Just about everyone in
If you’re still looking for some short reads to hit your annual reading goal, here are some suggestions. 4 Novellas I’ve Come Across (Links are to the Goodreads description.) The Last Children of Tokyo by Yoko Tawada (138 pages) The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick (192 pages) Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (176
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How the Union Lost the Remembrance War “The victors of the American Civil War failed to write their story into the history books, leaving a gap for the mythologizing of the Confederacy.” “After the American Civil War, there was what historian Robert J. Cook calls a ‘robust and purposeful narrative’ of the Union’s defeat of
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